How to make your flight in 1 hour flat...

IT'S 5:50AM!!! CHRIS WAKE THE HELL UP, IT'S 5:50AM!!!

The words are still ringing in my ears and I have a very hard time not laughing to myself when they do.

These are the words that were freight-training out of my girlfriend's mouth on Sunday morning, which is the day we were supposed to leave for Florida for a short vacation. This was the first vacation to a "tropical" destination that I have taken in over two years. We had 4 days marked off to get as charred by the sun as possible before heading back to the sleet-ridden New York City.

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 7am, from Newark Airport in New Jersey. We were in Brooklyn, New York. For those of you who don't know, this requires a 1.5 hour train ride or an approximately 15 mile car ride. 15 miles, no problem, right, well along those 15 miles you have to cross one bridge over the East River, make your way across a little island called MANHATTAN, go down into the Holland tunnel, and then a wee bit more stretch of road in the scenic New Jersey eastern shore. On a normal day, this hop-skip 15 mile trek would take any driver approximately 1.5 hours, maybe 2. Not Kidding.

We had 1 hour and 10 minutes to get there.

After I realized that my girlfriend was not attempting to strangle me to death but rather was driving to get me out of bed brought a sense of reality to my morning. This is not a sense of reality I was expecting to achieve considering I was on my way to Florida and had spend 12 hours on the previous day, which also happened to be St. Patrick's day, pouring the big black beautiful Guinness stout down my welcoming throat. Nonetheless, I said calmly as I leaped from my bed, "Let's just take a deep breath, we can do this."

Luckily I had packed the night before; unfortunately I was drunk when I packed and for some reason felt it necessary to include every short sleeved shirt in my wardrobe and hardly anything for the lower half, more on that later. I grabbed my phone, tiled the stored car service number, "Be there in 4 minutes" he said, which was our first good sign of the morning.

2 minutes later, the car is honking outside our door, I'm running out with not one but two backpacks I have packed for myself, and katie's tiny little carry on; for a second I was ashamed at the realization that I had packed no less than 3 times what my lady packed. The "her clothes are smaller" argument wouldn't even cover the spread.

We hopped in the car, "Newark Airport, stat, rapido, really fast, like the wind" we said, conveying as politely as possible that we were really really fucking late and needed to basically strap a jet rocket on the back of this guy's Lincoln towncar. "Ok", he said.

The second good sign came at the crest of the Williamsburg Bridge, I could see the rest of the bridge and the Stretch of Delancey street that leads us 3/4 of the way across Manhattan on the lower east side. Very few cars and red lights, which meant that by the time we got to the end of the bridge we would be hitting green lights and no traffic.

Having a car in New York and experiencing traffic in Manhattan has provided me with a little knowledge about gauging travel times. I have seen traffic backed up all the way across the bridge back into Brooklyn, and have seen 5 lanes of cars in Manhattan inching their way, fighting for miles. This is why when I noticed these things about the traffic, it was a little bit more promise that we might make it on time. Of course I kept this encouragement to my self because I am a sucker for suspense and I wanted to keep katie guessing as to whether or not we would make it.

We hit the tunnel at about 6:19 and there was no traffic. I have hit the tunnel around 5am, when the bars are letting out and the hoards head back to New Jersey from the Meatpacking district, it is a shit show. All of these drunk, tan, over-gelled, hip-hop blasting, blunt smokin, spinner rollin, Sean John wearin, spiked hair, muscle bound suburban white kids trying to squeeze their overpriced, overfinanced, uninsured SUVs into the Holland Tunnel. Luckily we missed that; which was the third good sing of the morning.

I had a good feeling that as long as this guy knew where he was going, we would make our plane if we hit Jersey by 6:30am; which we did. The ride was smooth, until we hit the airport. I figured no one else would be flying at 7am on a Sunday but apparently due to the terrible weather we had earlier in the week, people were still trying to get standby and there was terrible traffic and the lines both inside and outside the terminal were honestly 300 people long. This was a bad sign for the morning. We bid farewell to our escort, grabbed our bags and started to walk to the line. Neither one of us said anything to each other but we were both obviously in a complete downward spiral of emotion from actually making it to the damn airport within 40 minutes of waking up, travelling across Manhattan and two states, to then meet our fate at the end of a line to check in.

Having already checked in, pre-drunkenness on Saturday, I had our boarding passes in hand, I turned to Katie, who had fear in her eyes, and said "We can't check our bags, lines are too long, we have to carry everything on."

She was fine, she had a purse and the small carry on suitcase which was mine and I knew it would fit in the overhead bin. I looked at my larger backpack, which is one of those backpacks that recent graduates take with them to travel around Europe after graduation, you know the one that is typically 2 to 3 times the size of the person and will definitely pull them over in a slight breeze. Well, it didn't quite have that effect on me but nonetheless it did not seem to be carry-on-able. I figured I would chance it and redistribute or toss anything that they wouldn't let through. This was a reality that I was immediately willing to accept. I was really looking forward to this vacation, we were running extremely late, and we were basically done-for if we did not make this flight, which was leaving in 15 minutes by this point. What I didn't realize is that my beautiful, loving, caring, adoring girlfriend was not so willing to accept having to throw away her belongings if they were refused by the TSA. I found this out when we got to the security line and we started to put our bags on the machine. She turned to me and explained that she had packed some quantities of shampoo, conditioner, etc. that exceeded the raindrop portions that are allowed on airlines these days. I told to chance it and put her bag through.

Well, much to my surprise, her back did not make it through, and mine did, as bulky as it was. The agent declared "Bag Check!!! Who does this belong to?"

My girlfriend identified herself as the owner, granted rights to open the bag and proceeded to watch the humorless agent throw the liquid hygiene products into the garbage. Katie watched this in absolute horror, and as you could imagine, this all conveniently became: my fault. In her mind if I had not gone out drinking the previous day and night, then we would not be late and would not be rushing through the security, she could have planned ahead and not brought 4 gallons of hair product. Completely understandable where she was coming from. Still in a daze from this morning's events, rather than being sympathetic, I chuckled. oh did I chuckle. Even the TSA agent looked at me saying to herself, "Keep laughing buddy, you are a deadman" as she threw out the last of the bottles. I realized the crime I was committing and said to my girlfriend, "I will buy you two of whatever that woman is throwing out" I think that just added fuel to the fire but I have since made up on 50% of that promise.

We got through security, found out that our gate had been changed to, of course, the farthest gate from our current location. We raced through the terminal, arrived at the gate at about 6:52am and made it onto our plane.

The bags fit, we had seats, and I could feel the worries peeling off like an onion as we backed away from the jetway at exactly 7:01am. We were in the sky within 10 minutes while other people somehow spent hours in lines and delays that day. We made it, we worked for it, and we really really appreciated it.

We also made up and had a fantastic trip. Hopefully it won't be another 2 years before I get down to the tropics again.